At present, enterprises do not have an automated mechanism or systematic means for monitoring service level objectives for consumers that are on-site at an enterprise. For example, people at a retail store may wait in lines for long periods of time, because not enough registers are open. Similarly, consumers may wait for an indefinite amount of time after requesting assistance at a retail location. In particular, enterprises do not have a way to track wait times experienced by consumers at an enterprise site. If consumers must wait long periods of time before receiving assistance or before being able to check out, an enterprise is at risk of losing sales and of losing future business from the consumer. In addition, long wait times can result in consumers relating the experience of long wait times at an enterprise to other consumers, thereby potentially causing the loss of sales that might otherwise have been made to other consumers.
Enterprise sites typically employ manual surveillance of consumers to ensure that consumer wait times are not excessive. However, such surveillance is difficult to perform, because it is hard for a small number of managers to monitor the service provided to all of the consumers at an enterprise site. The difficulty of performing manual surveillance is increased during high volume periods, when the monitoring of checkout lines and of the amount of time required for consumers to obtain assistance is the most critical to customer satisfaction. In manual surveillance systems, the manager or managers must additionally track the enterprise associates on duty, and redeploy associates in response to changing requirements. Typically, associates are redeployed using voice commands issued by the manager. Such voice commands may be delivered by the manager to individual associates directly, or may be broadcast, for example using loudspeaker paging systems.
Conventional systems for ensuring the maintenance of service level objectives at enterprise sites also do not consider whether resources are allocated to individual consumers in a manner that is fair. For instance, the consumers that are most aggressive in pursuing assistance typically receive that assistance sooner than consumers who are less aggressive. In addition, consumers who are more aggressive in switching to a newly opened cash register, or who are fortunate in their selection of cash register lines, may experience shorter wait times than other consumers.